Sunday, 30 March 2014

Mobile DJ



Typically, mobile DJs play for a wide variety of people of different ages, backgrounds and different musical tastes. This means that in most cases, you'll need A LOT of different types of music (big band, jazz, swing, top-40, country, oldies, R&B, rock, Motown, modern rock, old school, classic rock, alternative, disco, techno, rap, Spanish, etc...).

How do you know what to buy? When you're first starting out, your best bet is to get all of the standards or "catch" songs. These are the most popular and recognizable hits that everyone knows and loves. If you don't have them, you'll be in trouble. These are songs like Old Time Rock and Roll, Twist and Shout, In the Mood, YMCA, Love Shack, Mony Mony, etc... Luckily, a lot of these can now be purchased on compilation CDs so you won't have to buy a CD for just one song which can get expensive quickly. Another nice thing about the hits from such styles as oldies, big band, classic rock, old school, disco and Motown is that once you have these songs, you'll rarely have to purchase another song from that style of music. Think about it, when was the last time you heard a new oldie but goodie?

For the newer songs, there are services that you can subscribe to that provide the latest releases. In many cases, these songs are available about the same time you might start hearing them on the radio. This also means that they may or may not be hits.

Some DJs brag about how many CDs or songs they have with some collections being upwards of 50,000 songs which is really quite an impressive number. Seriously, though how many songs are they going to play in a night? Today, the average song is about 5 minutes. If you look at some of the older songs, they averaged 3 minutes in length. There are 60 minutes in an hour and the average party is about 4 hours. This means that the average DJ is playing 50 to 60 songs a night and that's if they don't stop the music to talk occasionally. Hopefully, these guys with the big collections have gone digital and have all of this music on a hard drive somewhere. Can you imagine dragging all of these CDs or record albums from gig to gig?

More important than the number of songs in your collection is that you have the music that your audience wants to hear. This is where those standards come into play. Who cares if you have a bunch of songs that nobody has ever heard of or wants to hear? On the other hand, if you don't have the songs they want, you'll hear about it. The key is to have the right songs.

A good place to get a list of the top songs played by mobile DJs across the country is to look at the Mobile Beat Top 200 List. This contains a list of the top 200 songs that DJs have said that they play at parties and events. Another good resource is the top songs provided by DJ Intelligence. These are the songs requested by guests using their exclusive availability checking software.
 

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